If you ever noticed that most of our nonintellectual discussions and debates are wars between tradition and innovation. Here you may find a person trying to convince others that one should stick with the legacies: experienced, practices, and patterns — not necessarily using the said words but some contextual jargon— while the other person is contradicting like if only innovation and creativity can make a difference or in other words you learn as you go. The same quarrel exist in our software engineering field.

1. The Fundamentalist Craftsmen or Blind Followers

There are people who have beleive only in proven practices. They always have the same number of documents, same life-cycle, identical design, and unbelievably a single strategy for every project. The most surprising point for me is that even the consecutive failures are unable to make them believe that there’s something wrong. Instead of trying to make some improvements and searching for the shortcoming in their practices and strategy, they start believing that failure is a norm, or it’s not failure at all. For instance, you’ll hear them saying “Clients never get satisfied” or “Losing deadlines is a norm in our industry”.

Example —makes things easier

In a software project, the offshore back-office development team shares the documents reside in their local repository with the on-site front-office team to let them update the documents. In absence of their access on offline document repository, the back-office team shares the documents via email with the front-office team. Obviously they get frequent version conflicts in documents and when it happens, they arrange a meeting and manually resolve the conflicts in the documents. For months, they suffer with this problem but avoid change in their practice e.g. having an online document repository instead of sharing the documents on email. This approach is named as Brute Force approach by Steve McConnell.

2. The Innovator –or scientist, we can say

Away from the above category, the innovators are what most of our new graduates comprise of. They start with buzzwords like Web 2.0, cloud computing and believe that legacy practices are all obsolete and that the senior folks are not creative at all. They drive their projects for learning, ignoring the ground realities they neglect the cost and risk of change and avoid exploiting legacy patterns and practices. Since they believe that they make things better than they are, it’s possible if you see them writing their own DB connection pooling for technologies having built-in connection pooling or writing their own classes from scratch instead of extending the existing one. They often try to make simple things state-of-the-art and having insufficient knowledge and experience they get lost in the middle. This approach is named as “Silver Bullet approach” by Steve McConnell.

3. Engineering Mindset: the most needful

The moderate mindset — or engineering mindset as I say— tends to utilize and exploit the experience, invested by lots of great minds avoiding useless reinventions but never shy addressing the issues with a practice in the particular scenario. The mindset says that understand your objective whether it should be build-to-learn or learn-to-build. It says that to be honest and successful, an engineer shouldn’t behave like a scientist who build and destroy just for learning. And it says that there’s always room for improvement since improvement is a continues process and a going concern but it’s not the ultimate goal of an engineer which is to deliver the most optimal and economical.

A single practice may have various out comes when followed with or without reason. So, if a practice is being followed by majority, most probably there are reasons, try to find them, don’t shy asking other followers if you couldn’t, but if nobody else knows, you have at least one reason to avoid it. Better to have your own with reasons instead of following blindly.

a request

Being an engineer, I do not think, I am right all the way; considering that I’ve limited amount of skills, knowledge, and experience. Your comments and disagreements are highly anticipated hoping it’ll help us having a more balanced mindset.